A Squid Named Ishmael

Rachel Davis's recent Scitable Blog post about bacterial communication, bioluminescence, and the bobtail squid reminded me of two related things: my favorite comic strip, Lio, and my fascination with all things tentacled.

Lio is a syndicated comic strip by Mark Tatulli. It features a little boy named Lio and his entourage of strange creatures. Mummies, zombies, a snake named Frank, and his pet giant squid, Ishmael, inhabit Lio's world in the same way cats and dogs inhabit ours. Lio also lives every science-minded child's fantasy: He has a basement chemistry lab that some real-world scientists would die for, and his experiments would make even a hard-core  genetic engineer squirm. But he sure has fun.

So is happiness really a squishy cephalopod? It's unlikely. Giant squid like Ishmael would be terrible pets. In addition to being huge they live in the deep ocean, and none have survived long at the surface. They're also messy eaters; catching their prey with tentacles, holding it with serrated sucker rings, and shredding it with their beaks (the only hard part of a giant squid).

But the bobtail squid is different. It's little, it's cute, and it's unusual--at least for a squid. The Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymma scolopes) has a unique light organ in its mantle that helps it hide from predators. This light organ features stacks of silvery reflector plates called reflectins that surround colonies of bioluminescent bacteria. Researchers studying this squid think that its mutualistic method of cultivating bacteria and using the light they produce could inspire new nanotechnology designs in spectroscopy and optics.

Who wouldn't want to make friends with a scientifically important glow-in-the-dark critter that looks this? Lio would love him (or her).